A P o rtrait of the A rtis t as a Young Man
and L ’Education Sentim entale:
the structural affinities.1
By David Hayman.
In 1901, nearly two years before he began work on the first version of
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce wrote concerning
George Moore:
Mr. Moore is really struggling in the backwash of the tide that has advanced from Flaubert through Jakobsen to D ’Annunzio: for two entire eras lie between Madame Bovary
and 11 Fuoco.2
There is more to this rather pontifical statement than the value judgment
of a nineteen-year-old initiate. Here, for the convenience of later critics, Joyce
has listed some of the major literary forebears of his own first novel, and, perhaps unwittingly, he has charted the course to be taken by his later work. Flaubert, Jacobsen and D’Annunzio, through their several Bildungsromane furnished
Joyce not only with theories, images, points of style and an oecasional sequence
or scene; they also combined to supply precedents for a significant number
of the traits which make A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man a new
departure in the English novel. In D’Annunzio’s II Fuoco, with its curious
blend of symbolist and realist techniques, Joyce found a model for the
Portrait's suggestive, almost transitionless narrative method, a method which
permits the author to deal with units of experience in a variegated prose style
weighted with metaphors and parallels designed to define the artist-hero’s
experience in terms of his ego as opposed to his environment. More specifically,
Joyce may well have derived from this novel, whose first half is significantly
entitled the “Epiphany of the Flame”, crucial images like that of the labyrinth
and the faun, the Daedalus-Icarus identity of Stephen and the extraordinarily
effective though extravagantly mannered style which expresses Stephen’s men1. A somewhat shorter version of this article was presented before the Comparative
Literature Section 1 of the Modern Language Association in Chicago, December
1961.
2. “The Day of the Rabblement” in James Joyce, The Critical Writings, edited by
Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann (New York, 1959), p. 71.
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David Hayman
tal processes in the Portraif s third chapter. Jens Peter Jacobsen’s great novel
Niels Lyhne is by contrast a lean and spare account of the childhood and sen­
timental education of a dilettantish poet. It is remarkable for its singlemindedness, its superb dramatic timing and its frank treatment of controversial themes.
Joyce seems to have modeled Stephen’s religious agony, as depicted at the
close of the retreat chapter, after Jacobsen’s portrayal of the repentence of
Fennimore Refstrup, an adulterous woman mourning the death of her hus­
band.
In Flaubert (whose every word Joyce claimed to have read)3 the Irish
writer may have discovered precedents for the Portraif s architectonic struc­
ture, its brilliant and subtle balance of ironies, its “impersonal” narrator
whose point of view is only apparently identical with that of the protagonist.
The flaubertian precedent stands at the beginning of and Controls the direction taken by Joyce’s metaphorical tide, but the character of Flaubert’s influence is as hard to fix as the affinities are pervasive; for, apart from a nearmasochistic perfectionism and from some pregnant theories which Joyce was
not alone in appropriating, Flaubert, like Joyce, is most remarkable for his
experiments with style and structure.
Althougli it is not the greatest of these experiments, L ’Education Senti­
mentale, the novel of whose structure Flaubert was most proud, is, perhaps
3. See Stuart Gilbert, James Joyce’s Ulysses (New York, 1952), p. 92. Joyce’s knowledge
of Flaubert’s works can be reasonably well documented from his juvenilia, his notebooks, his letters and his comments to friends conserved in biographies and mem­
oirs. Thus, for example, bookseller’s bilis reproduced by Richard Ellmann in his
biography indicate that, along with eighteen other items purchased between October
1913 and May 1914, the chronically impecunious author purchased both Flaubert’s
Saint Antoine and his Premieres Æuvres (Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, New
York, 1959, p. 788.). Among the notes taken in 1913 in preparation for the writing
of the play Exiles we find the following: “Since the publication of the lost pages of
M adame Bovary the centre of sympathy appears to have been esthetically shifted
from the lover or fancyman to the husband or cuckold . . . This change is utilized
in Exiles although the union of Richard and Bertha is irregular . . . ” (Exiles, London,
1952, p. 165). Again, in Ellmann we read that in 1920 Joyce was able to point out
errors in the French of Trois Contes to the Swiss writer, Edmond Jaloux. All of the
major critics have noted Joyce’s use of flaubertian ideas, techniques and theories,
though to date only Haskell Block in an unpublished doctorat thesis has attempted
to treat them in depth. We read of the influence of the Trois Contes upon the style
of Dubliners; of Flaubert’s letters upon the aesthetic theory expressed in A Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Man and of Flaubert’s theories and life upon Joyce’s attitudes
as an artist; of M adame Bovary and Bouvard et Pécuchet upon the subject matter
of Ulysses; and of the Tentation de Saint Antoine upon the form and matter of
the Circe chapter of Ulysses.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
163
more than either Madame Bov ary' or La Tentation de Saint Antoine, the
logical precurser not only for Niels Lyhne but also and in a different way for
the Portrait. If the multiple amours of Jacobsen’s ineffectual hero recall the
career of Flaubert’s Frédéric and hence the subject matter of L ’Education Sen­
timentale, Flaubert’s methods (or manner) as well as his matter find important
parallels in Joyce s first puriste novel. Of these methods one in particular could
not have been transmitted by any secondary source: L ’Education Sentimentale
is built upon a framework composed of systematically paired antithetical
sequences, that is, lyrical moments (epiphanies) followed in due time by lucid
ones (anti-epiphanies), sequences designed to clarify the hero’s motives without
authorial intervention, to measure his progress and to relate his aspirations
to his achievement. The method represents one solution to the problems raised
by the dogma of impersonality. By demonstrating that Joyce, when faced with
problems similar to those of Flaubert, made use of an identical framework, I
hope to establish the Portrait more firmly within the tradition which he him­
self outlined.
Broadly speaking, L ’Education Sentimentale and A Portrait of the Artist
as a Young Man are fictionalized autobiographies treating ironically the emo­
tional development of self-deceiving questers who follow idealistic and illusory
visions toward unrecognized goals, moving from untenable position to untenable position through a half perceived world. In each case the plot concems
two aspects of the hero’s experience: his growth in relation to his environment
and his progress toward self-fulfillment.
Frédéric Moreau spends his adult life pursuing the married woman who
combines in his romantic imagination the paradise of the flesh and the chaste
muse. The pursuit of this faustian ideal draws him increasingly into the currents
of his age where successively he finds as surrogates: youth, riches and women.
When, finally, after 27 years of frustration and emotional cache-cache, his
Helen offers herself, aging and no longer attractive, a symbol of his misspent
youth, he is forced to abandon his dream of volupté- to-come so that he may
discover in the now-distant past his land of milk and honey.
Like Frédéric, the boy Stephen Dedalus ends his quest with a paradoxical
return to innocence. But whereas the currents of life move the passive Frédé­
ric through the real world, Stephen is driven by disappointments and growth
4. It should be noted that Flaubert has in effect perfected for L ’Education Sentimentale
a structure first used in Madame Bovary and that less elaborate examples of the
devices which I shall deal with in this paper are to be found in that book. L’Education
Sentimentale by virtue of its polish and its subject matter seems to me to be the
more likely source for Joyce’s epiphany sequences.
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David Hayman
towards the experience of himself. One by one he tests each of his powers
beginning with his will. Building through five stages to a knowledge of the
combined resources of his being, shucking at each stage the futile husk of
former illusions, he succeeds in metaphorically recreating himself, in being
reborn. Metaphorically, by leaving home, he discards the mother image and
the ties which have haunted his childhood and adolescence; but he fails to
recognize the nature of the metaphor, of the cumulative effects of his quest or
of his internal commitments.
In order to dramatize the immutability of their protagonists’ natures and to
measure their progress towards self-realization, if not self-recognition, both
authors make systematic use of the device which I shall call the epiphany: a
lyrical and wish-fulfilling moment during which the illusory is made to appear
as immediate and valid as the real. Such moments are given a form which
approximates or counterfeits the lyrical in Joyce’s sense of that term: “the
form wherein the artist presents his image in immediate relation to himself.”5
Thus, during epiphanies the prose of the third person narrator seems to be
fused with or, as Richard Ellmann puts it, “infected by the hero’s mind.”0
I am deliberately limiting my use of the term to those passages which Joyce
himself would have called the crucial or climactic epiphanies: moments of
illusion which are nevertheless instants of illumination or radiance for both
the protagonist and the reader. Joyce’s term is of course more inclusive,
but its implications are too complex to treat here.7 For Joyce the epiphany
is first of all the final stage in the apprehension of beauty by the viewer who
discovers in a work of art an object or a circumstance, an aesthetic significance
or radiance which he has not previously perceived. The object or circum­
stance may be apprehended objectively or subjectively, that is, its radiance
may be partially equated with its subjective impact upon the observer, but
no matter what the source, the experience should be both pleasurable and
static. To use the author’s words, it “arrests the mind” in the presence of
beauty. Joyce himself extends this fundamental definition (the one given in
Stephen Hero) of the epiphany as a moment of perception to include the
artifact which records and transmits the pure experience. In Ulysses he has
5. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York, Viking Press, 1956), p. 213.
6. Ellmann, p. 150. Mr. Ellmann is referring to a passage from Joyce’s early essay
“A Portrait of the Artist” in which he quite accurately sees the germs of Joyce’s later
development.
7. In applying this term to a device used by both Joyce and Flaubert I am not implying
that the two writers shared a theory of epiphanies. It should be clear that Joyce
invented a term and a theory but not an experience or a technique.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
165
Stephen speak mockingly in a fit of depression of “epiphanies on green oval
leaves ... to be sent... to all the great libraries of the world .. .”8 Hence, the
passages from the Portrait and L ’Education Sentimentale which I have called
epiphanies may be viewed as both art and event: Stephen and Frédéric have a
subjective and semi-mystical moment of truth, the reader is permitted at once
to share the hero’s experience and to view it as an aspect of the aesthetic whole.
For the reader the epiphany is static by virtue, among other things, of the
double focus. His experience is paradoxically one of detached involvement.
For the protagonist the moment is static to the extent that it interrupts the
action as would a fainting spell; it is what Stephen describes as “an enehantment of the heart” and as such it curtails the logical processes, stopping time
and transcending it. But such moments generate a kinetic reaction, providing
the anti-aesthetic impulse to action by stimulating in the hero a desire to sustain
the illusion. Stephen is neither attracted nor repelled by his bird-girl (chapter
four); Frédéric contemplates in awe his “vision” in chapter one of section /.
Yet both boys set out in quest of the vision’s actuality.
I shall use the term epiphany sequence to denote the tripartite development
during which the hero moves from a relatively detached position as uncomprehending witness to his own depressing experience of the world to a fullblown subjective euphoria, losing himself in the vision, identifying for one
blinding instant reality and the dream. This moment of bliss or blindness, this
epiphany is succeeded by a relatively lucid interval: the anti-climax, during
which objective and subjective elements are combined to the detriment of the
latter. Though there is some interpenetration of mood and motifs, the three
aspects are clearly differentiated. Flaubert, whose subject matter is failure,
locates the epiphany in the first chapter of each of his three sections and
includes all three elements of the sequence in each of his epiphany chapters:
relating the hero first to the world as he sees it, then to the vision and finally
to the vision in conjunction with the world. Joyce, whose subject is illusory or
impermanent achievement and whose structure is climactic, places the epiphany
in the last section of each chapter and locates the anti-climax at the beginning
of the succeeding chapter. In each instance the lyrical impulse which has
8. Ulysses (New York, Modern Library, 1934), p. 41. Given this application we may
even use the term epiphany to describe Joyce’s books, seeing the Portrait or Ulysses
as sequences of epiphanies linked together to form the larger epiphany which is the
novel. (See S. L. Goldberg’s extended treatment of Joyce’s aesthetic theory in The
Classical Temper (London, 1961)). Thus the book becomes, like Mallarmé’s “poéme”
a metaphor: a metaphor composed of metaphors, a sort of total expression or communication.
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David Hayman
established the shape of the hero’s dream survives inteUectuaUy the anti-climax
only to be discredited toward the middle of the section or chapter during the
passage which I shall call the anti-epiphany.
The least alloyed lyrical passage in L ’Education Sentimentale occurs in
chapter one of section I during the eighteen-year-old hero’s river voyage from
Paris to Montereau. The young aesthete, Frédéric Moreau, after having failed
to nourish his romantic muse upon the unsavory aspect of his fellow passengers achieves without warning what Stephen Dedalus would call the “birth
of his soul”. Pushing open the gate of the first class section, he sees Marie
Arnoux under circumstances recalling Faust’s vision of his ideal in the mirror
of the Hexenkiiche. Without knowing who she is or where she comes from he
gives her an imaginary identity, spins a dream about her which neither the
atmosphere of the boat, the noise and tawdriness, the uninspiring landscape
or the boorish behaviour of her mephistophelian husband can dissipate:
II y avait dans le ciel de petits nuages blancs arrétés, - et l’ennui, vaguement répandu,
semblait alanguir la marche du bateau et rendre l’aspect des voyageurs plus insignifiant
encore.
A part quelques bourgeois, aux Premieres, c’étaient des ouvriers, des gens de boutique
avec leurs femmes et leurs enfants. .. Le pont était sali par des écales de noix, des bouts
de cigares, des pelures de poires, des détritus de charcuterie apportée dans du papier;
trois ébénistes, en blouse, stationnaient devant la cantine; un joueur de harpe en haillons
se reposait, accoudé sur son instrument; on entendait par intervalles le bruit du charbon
de terre dans le fourneau, un éclat de voix, un rire . . . Frédéric, pour rejoindre sa place,
poussa la grille des Premieres, dérangea deux chasseurs avec leurs chiens.
Ce fut comme une apparition:
Elle était assise, au milieu du bane, toute seule; ou du moins il ne distingua personne,
dans réblouissement qui lui envoyérent ses yeux . . .
Elle avait un large chapeau de paille, avec des rubans roses qui palpitaient au vent
derriére elle. Ses bandeaux noirs, contournant la pointe de ses grands sourcils, descendaient
tres bas et semblaient presser amoureusement Fovale de sa figure. Sa robe de mousseline
claire, tachetée de petits pois, se répandait å plis nombreux. Elle était en train de broder
quelque chose; et son nez droit, son menton, toute sa personne se découpait sur le fond
de Fair bleu.9
The equating sentence: “Ce fut comme une apparition”, and the subsequent
mingling of objective detail with the hero’s subjective reactions to Marie
render the illusion equal to the reality with which it competes on the scale
of values. So true is this that, though the events described are banal, we often
forget that the view we receive of Marie is a product of the astigmatic vision
of a na'ive ephebe. When, shortly after this encounter, the ragged harpist
mentioned in the previous citation begins to play for Marie’s daugther, both
9. Flaubert, CEuvres; (NRF, vol. 2, Paris, 1951, pp. 36-37).
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
167
he and his performance are transformed by the presence of the lady who has
already become Frédéric’s muse. We may compare the two descriptions of
the musician to see how much the adolescent’s consciousness impinges upon
the texture of the narrator’s prose, imposing itself even upon his choice of
naturalistic detail:
C’était une romance orientale, ou il était question de poignards, de fleurs et d’étoiles.
L’homme en haillons chantait cela d'une voix mordante; les battements de la machine
coupaient la mélodie å fausse mesure; il pin?ait plus fort: les cordes vibraient, et leurs
sons métalliques semblaient exhaler des sanglots, et comme la plainte d’un amour
orgueilleux et vaincu. Des deux cotés de la riviére, des bois s’inclinaient jusqu’au bord
de l’eau; un courant d’air frais passait; Mme Arnoux regardait au loin d’une maniére
vague. Quand la musique s’arréta, elle remua les paupiéres plusieurs fois, comme si elle
sortait d’un songe. ((Euvres, page 38).
We need not be surprised to find that, after he has taken leave of the attractive
bourgeoise to whom he has never spoken, Frédéric compares her to “women
in romantic novels”. His quasi-mystic experience has “enlarged his universe”.
Perhaps it has even made a man of him:
II n’aurait voulu rien ajouter, rien retrancher å sa personne. L’univers venait tout å coup
de s’élargir. Elle était le point lumineux ou l’ensemble des choses convergeait; . . . il
s’abandonnait å une joie réveuse et infinie. (Æuvres, page 41).
Stephen Dedalus’ crucial epiphany takes place at the end of the Portraif s
penultimate chapter as he walks along the beach one evening shortly after his
graduation from Belvedere college and his rejection of the priesthood. His
walk is marred at first by a residue of puritanical shame and a fear of life
which leads him to dwell upon the ugliness of his surroundings. At the end of
the first half of the sequence the sound of his own name identifies him with
his namesake, the artificer Daedalus, and his profound depression gives way to
euphoria. He experiences the sensations of flight, imagines himself released
from the grave of adolescence, at one with life, and finds confirmation for his
mood in the sudden appearance of the bird-like girl described in the following
paragraphs:
A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed
like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird.
Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane’s . . . Her bosom was . . . slight and
soft as the breast of some darkplumaged dove...
She was alone and still, gazing out to sea; and when she felt his presence and the
worship of his eyes her eyes turned to him in quiet sufferance of his gaze, without shame
or wantonness . . .
- Heavenly God! cried Stephen’s soul, in an outburst of profane joy.
He turned away from her suddenly and set off across the strand. His cheeks were
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David Hayman
afalme; his body was aglow .. . Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word
had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy. (Portrait, page 171).
This silent communion with a girl whom Stephen has endowed with magical
qualities consistent with his own desires is generally thought to be the climactic
moment of the novel. Like Frédéric’s, Stephen’s complete cominitment to the
illusion is conveyed by means of a dramatic shift from apparent objectivity to
controlled and deepening subjectivity. The narrator disarms his reader by
at first describing objectively the hero’s dejection, his confusion, discontent,
indecision and revery, allowing this medley of moods to color the descriptions.
In doing so he relies heavily upon simile words which give his suggestive
images plausibilty and internal logic, creating the impression that Stephen is
actually watching himself feel the emotions the narrator describes. As the
passage progresses and both Stephen’s and the narrator’s critical faculties are
sublimated, the similes grow sparser and the logic of the outer world gives
way discreetly to that of the vision. Thus the girl who was like a bird is trans­
formed in his imagination, becoming, without benefit of the words like or as,
“a wild an gel of mortal youth and beauty”.
Not only the manner but also the matter of these two epiphany passages
reveals, upon examination, unmistakable parallels. Frédéric and Stephen, two
adolescent boys, both about to enter the university, both with artistic pretensions, experience beauty: the one on a river, the other by the sea. Each
encounters an isolated female figure who is made to embody some transcen­
dental aspect of his own dream. Neither hero converses with his ideal or lusts
after her though she is in each case sensually appealing and though both feel
an immense and quasi-religious joy in her presence. Each experiences a rite
of passage into manhood and, in a faustian context, a stimulus to action.
Similarly, in both instances, the illusion rises from the muck of reality and
seems to return there. Thus Frédéric’s departure is ignored by Mme Arnoux;
his return home after the boat trip is characterized by ineptitude and prose.
Stephen’s epiphany is immediately followed in chapter V by a description
of his breakfast table with its pool of drippings and its louse-stained pawn
tickets, components of his newly discovered worldly estate.
Equally important are the clues which point to the paradoxical nature of
the dream, to its lack of inner consistency, to its false relationship to reality,
and to the probable outcome of the hero’s aspirations. Previous to seeing the
bird-girl, Stephen has identified with the “hawk or eagle,” Daedalus, declaring
himself and his soul delivered not only from “fear”, “incertitude” and “shame”
but also from adolescence and the church. Yet his reaction to the bird-girl,
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
169
herself a combination of dove and erane, refleets, like Frédéric’s reaction to
Marie, an unstable compound of material and spiritual ideals. His appreciation
of his vision is voiced in the words “Heavenly God!” which the narrator
qualifies as “an outburst of profane joy”. The dreamer who has conceived of
himself as free to wander to the ends of the earth exhibits towards the end
of the epiphany an ambivalent attitude toward the time and space he has
previously discarded when he asks himself “How far had he walked? What
hour was it?” The components have begun to sunder even before the moment
has been consummated.
The structural complement of the epiphany is the anti-epiphany: a sequence whose function is to provide the hero with insights which will pave
the way for the next epiphany by furthering or completing the destruction of
the illusion surviving the previous one. Whereas the epiphanies are markedly
irrational, partaking of the nature of hallucinations or dreams, climaxed by
moments of lyrical inspiration rather than insights, the anti-epiphanies are
composed of intensely conscious moments during which the hero receives an
insight, witnesses rather than experiences an unveiling. In general such pas­
sages systematically reverse not only the imagery of the lyrical epiphany but
also its action and mood. Here the events are narrated in detail; the hero’s
thoughts are noted, but the insight is communicated not through his emotional
reaction but through a combination of carefully arranged descriptive details
and dialogue upon which the hero is occasionally permitted to comment. By
focusing and crystallizing his disillusionment the anti-epiphanies restore bal­
ance and consolidate the hero’s gains. They give him, along with an awareness
of the nature of his illusion, a partial understanding of the lesson learned,
and therefore they make possible further progress towards enlightenment.
Just as the epiphanies are compounded of vision and blindness, anti-epiphanies
join negative and positive insights. If the epiphany drives the hero out in quest
of fulfillment, the anti-epiphany forces him back into himself, enabling him
to take stock of his position. Thus the fleshly component of Frédéric’s ethereal
vision is made available to him during an anti-epiphany which also serves to
reénforce the positive thrust of the original experience. Similarly, Stephen’s
romantic error in dedicating his whole soul to the limited world represented
by Ireland and symbolized by a Dublin Street girl is exposed in a sequence
which serves to broaden his vision and deepen his understanding of his situa­
tion, sending him out into the world where he must inevitably face new disillusionments.
The anti-epiphany passages in L ’Education Sentimentale are the visit to
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the Alhambra dance-hall (pages 101-108), the races at the Champ de Mars
(pages 232-245), the auction of Mme Araoux’ belongings (pages 434-448).
In each of these passages Frédéric paradoxically realizes some good whose
possession was desired at the time of the vision. Paradoxically, because the
reality belies the promise. The same may be said with few qualifications for
Stephen’s moments of insight. The latter occur in all but the third chapter of
the Portrait where the emotional context limits clarity of vision. It might be
said that the entire retreat sequence serves the purpose in that chapter which
the shorter anti-epiphany sequences serve in other chapters. Stephen experiences anti-epiphanies in chapter one during the Christmas dinner, in chapter
two during the trip to Cork, in chapter four during the interview with the
Director of Belvedere and in chapter five during the evening of the interview
with Cranly.
The anti-epiphany for Frédéric’s vision of Marie Amoux falls in the fifth
chapter of section one during an otherwise uneventful and even sordid visit to
the Alhambra dance-hall. Frédéric, who has come to console himself for his
inability to seduce Marie, suddenly discovers her husband under circumstances which ironically recall those of the first epiphany. Pushing through
some bushes where formerly he pushed through the first-class gate, he sees, not
the Spanish-looking Marie sitting alone, but Mile Vatnaz, the Spanish procuress, who is “seul avec Arnoux”. Instead of being dazzled by Marie’s gaze,
he is forced to admire the Vatnaz’ “admirables yeux, fauves avec des points
d’or dans les prunelles, tout pleins d’esprit, d’amour et de sensualité”. (Æuvres,
page 104). Instead of listening to the ragged harpist while he watches Marie
gaze dreamily ashore, Frédéric, well aware of the contrast, listens to the cabotin
Delmas singing affectedly le Frére de VAlbanaise while Vatnaz exhibits sensual
joy:
Les paroles rappelérent a Frédéric celles que chantait l’homme en haillons, entre les
tambours du bateau. Ses yeux s’attachaient involontairement sur le bas de la robe étalée
devant lui. Aprés chaque couplet, il y avait une longue pause, - et le souffle du vent
dans les arbres ressemblait au bruit des ondes.
Mile Vatnaz, en écartant d’une main les branches d’un troene qui lui masquait la vue
de l’estrade, contemplait le chanteur, fixement, les narines ouvertes, les cils rapprochés,
et comme perdue dans une joie sérieuse. (Oeuvres, page 105).
Following this experience, Frédéric leaves the Alhambra and wanders to
Arnoux’ Street to stare at the wall of Marie’s house in an effort to refurbish the
tarnished illusion. But here too he is forced to aknowledge his deception. The
vision has been reversed. Marie can no longer be isolated from her ubiquitous
husband:
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
171
Maintenant, sans doute, elle reposait, tranquille comme une fleur endormie, avec ses
beaux cheveux noirs parmi les dentelles de l’oreiller, les lévres entrecloses, la téte sur
un bras.
Celle d Arnoux lui apparut. II s’éloigna, pour fuir cette vision. {Æuvres, page 108).
Within this same anti-epiphany there are equally elaborate and ironic parallels
with the next epiphany: the masked ball at Rosanette Bron’s during which
Rosanette makes love to Delmas but takes Arnoux’ neighbour, Mr. Oudry, as
her lover. Among the elements foreshadowing this sequence are the factitious
Moorish setting of the Alhambra, the presence of Delmas, Vatnaz and Arnoux,
the faet that Arnoux is at the Alhambra to arrange for Rosanette to become
his mistress. It seems appropriate that the first chapter of section 11 should
culminate in Frédéric s dream: “il lui semblait qu’il était attelé pres d’Arnoux,
au timon d un fiacre, et que la Maréchale [that is, Rosanette], å califourchon
sur lui, l’éventrait avec ses éperons d’or”. {æuvres, page 159). Over this vision
hover the eyes of Madame Arnoux “légers comme des papilions, ardents com­
me des torches..
In a like manner the penultimate segment of the Portrait’s fifth chapter,
through its objective treatment of spoiled friendships, isolation, flight and departure and of Stephen’s rejection of his mother, Ireland, and the church,
teverses the bird-girl epiphany. At the same time it foreshadows the final
epiphany, revealing Stephen’s indecision and doubts. Chapter five’s antiepiphany opens with an evocation of a flock of small birds, but the bird image
has lost some of its savour, and Stephen, in spite of his newly acquired knowledge of the occult, feels lonely, weary and deceived:
The colonnade above him made him think vaguely of an ancient temple and the ashplant
on which he leaned wearily of the curved stick of an augur. A sense of fear of the
unknown moved in the heart of his weariness, a fear of symbols and portents, of the
hawklike man whose name he bore soaring out of his captivity on osier woven wings,
of Thoth, the god of writers... (Portrait, page 225).
This mood is sustained as Stephen watches the sterile “monkeyshines” of his
friends, silently observes EC as she greets Cranly, the priest of the world,
to whom he later confesses . Specific parallels with the beach epiphany are
not lacking. The “crane” and “dark-plumaged dove” embodied in the birdgirl are here metamorphosed into Cranly and EC, both of whom pointedly
ignore Stephen. The suggestion of an Icarian or Luciferian fall which followed
Stephen’s Daedalian flight in chapter IV (“ O, Cripes, I’m drownded! - ”)
is given new force when Stephen misquotes Nash’s “Briglitness falls from the
air”. Likewise, the elation and light which characterize the earlier scene are
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turned here into depression and darkness. The young hero’s ecstatic and quasireligious dedication to the world proves most ironic when Cranly, his best
friend, shows himself to be a hypocrite and a betrayer, and when EC, the
chaste bird-girl’s flirtatious and seductive surrogate is found to possess the
batl ike soul of her people.
Though somewhat less meehanical than in Flauberts’s anti-epiphanies,
the reversal of images which occurs in the following passage is reasonably
evident. Note that the flush which formerly colored Stephen’s cheek is now
seen on that of Cranly, that the rosy light imagery of the beach sequence is
reversed to accord with Stephen's rimbaldian mood, and that the crucial confrontation has been replaced by a slight: “She passed out from the porch of
the library and bowed across Stephen in reply to Cranly’s greeting. He also?
Was there not a slight flush on Cranly’s cheek? . .. The light had waned. He
could not see.” (Portrait, page 232). Instead of rushing off elated and alone
as he did after the bird-girl epiphany, Stephen loiters under the colonnade
thinking lustful thoughts as he waits for Cranly like some loyal acolyte or
serf:
She had passed through the dusk. And therefore the air was silent save for one soft hiss
that fell. And therefore the tongues about him had ceased their babble. Darkness was
falling.
Darkness fails from the air.
A trembling joy .. . played like a fairy host around him. But why? Her passage through
the darkening air or the verse with its black vowels. ..
He walked away slowly towards the deeper shadows at the end of the colonnade,
beating the stone softly with his stick to hide his revery from the students...
.. . Vaguely first and then more sharply he smelt her body. A conscious unrest
seethed in his blood ...
A louse crawled over the nape of his neck... (Portrait, pages 232-234).
Brittle, alert to the dangers of self-deception, he withdraws rather than expose
himself to the world. Like Frédéric, Stephen in the anti-epiphanies is at least
half aware of the ironic parallels. Both are witnesses as much to their thoughts
as to the events; both see mocking mirrors held up to their fleeting lyrical
impulses.
While underlining the ironic relationships of epiphanies to anti-epiphanies,
we must not fail to note the non-ironic linkage of epiphany to epiphany and
anti-epiphany to anti-epiphany, a suggestive device which clearly states in each
novel the parallel functions of the subdivisions, sections and chapters. In
section II of L ’Education Sentimentale the crowds, the deceptions, Frédéric’s
moods and even the principal event from the horse-race anti-epiphany parallel
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the mood, action, language and imagery of the Alhambra scene of section /.
Here, for example, is Flaubert’s description of the horses racing at the Champ
de Mars: “revenant bien vite, ils grandissaient; leur passage coupait le vent,
le sol tremblait, les cailloux volaient; l’air s’engouffrant dans les casaques des
jockeys, les faisait palpiter comme des voiles...« ((Euvres, page 237). His
description of the dancers doing the galop at the Alhambra does more than
capture the same rhythm: “Haletants, souriants, et la face rouge, ils défilaient
dans un tourbillon qui soulevait les robes avec les basques des habits; les
trombones rugissaient plus fort; le rythme s’accélérait . . . ” (QLuvres, page
106).
In the Portrait the Director of Belvedere’s interrogation of Stephen in
chapter four parallels Cranly’s interrogation of him in chapter five in that
both men are in effect confessing to Stephen, the unwilling confessor. To
emphasize this faet, Joyce first describes the Director’s head as a memento
mori: “The priest’s face was in total shadow, but the waning daylight from
behind him touched the deeply grooved temples and the curves of the skull”.
(Portrait, pages 153-154). Later Cranly is described in his role as “the decollated precursor”: “... in the shadow of the trees Stephen saw his pale
face, framed by the dark, and his large dark eyes.” (Portrait, page 245).
Once these complex but consistent interrelationships are recognized and
we are aware of the function of epiphanies and anti-epiphanies as markers
along the road of experience, we may assume that a study of these passages
in sequence will reveal the nature of that road and its extent.
The progress of the epiphanies in L ’Education Sentimentale may be gauged
in terms of action, of imagery or in terms of Frédéric’s dream. For example, we
note that each succeeding epiphany chapter takes up its action metaphorically
where the preceding sequence ends. Thus Frédéric’s anti-climactic carriage-ride
home, at the end of chapter one, is reflected in the coach trip to Paris which
opens the second epiphany, while the orgy which follows the glamour of the
masked ball is in its turn reflected in the masquerade of pomp and the orgy
of destruction during the revolutionary sequence which opens section ///.
If we study the river-of-life imagery which dominates the first third of
each epiphany chapter, we find that Frédéric moves from a boat in the center
of the Seine in section / to a coach drawn by wavy-maned horses in section 11
and that in section III he is carried by the surging crowd of revolutionaries.
Passive in all things, Frédéric is drawn along by the increasingly turbulent
stream, forced to participate in a reality which he fails to understand. A
similar progression is evident in his dream or quest object which is first seen
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through a vision of Marie Arnoux as a romantic ideal: chaste but appealing.
In the second epiphany, Marie’s image is refined to a hovering kiss which
haunts the hero as he lusts after the dancers at the masked ball. At last, in
section III, reality triumphs as Frédéric attempts, amidst dead luxury at Versailles, to renew his dream in the company of his mistress, Rosanette. Appropriately, in that section’s anti-epiphany, Frédéric sees his dream fall under an
auctioneer’s hammer to the possessive Mme Dambreuse.
In the Portrait each of Stephen’s epiphanies marks a stage in his development, teaches him the nature of another of his powers after he has been purged
of past error. Thus, the unmerited punishment which the boy receives in chapter
one destroys his faith in the power of innocence, leading him to discover his
will as a moral force. In the next epiphany his will is punished by desire and
he is led to discover the power of his senses through intercourse with a whore.
He learns to control his lust in chapter three after the retreat sermons which
force him to discover the power of his emotions. In chapter four he purges
himself of his adolescence and of his emotional commitments to the church,
witnessing the birth of his soul or spirit which finally takes wing in chapter
five to carry his Creative intellect out of Ireland. Each experience destroys
his faith in some aspect of that environment of which he will paradoxically
become the mirror, adds something to the mask which he exposes to the
world, and contributes to the making of the artist.
With each succeeding epiphany Stephen becomes increasingly the agent
of his own seduction; the vision or illusion becomes first more and then less
and less the product of his participation in the world. Hence the Rector of
Clongowes seduces Stephen with a soft word, a look and a handclasp; the harlot seduces him with an embrace; the bumbling capuchin permits him to cleanse
his conscience through a confession; the sirenlike bird-girl simply endures
Stephen’s rapturous gaze; and finally, the diary provides a sounding board for
his disjunet musings. Contrarywise, the successive anti-epiphanies show
Stephen to be increasingly involved with the world, increasingly aware of his
own position in it. The distance spanned in five chapters may best be gauged
by comparing Stephen, the mute and nearly uncomprehending observer of
his elders’ behavior in chapter one’s Christmas dinner, to Stephen in chapter
five, observing as an equal (or superior) the behavior of his comrades, judging
and calibrating his own emotional reactions.
Like Flaubert, then, Joyce has used the epiphanies and the anti-epiphanies
as keystones of a complex and well-ordered structure, a means of imposing
upon his narrative the rhythm of Stephen’s growth, a means of defining the
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175
hero’s questand his achievement in terms of a eonstant and seemingly inevitable
pattern of experience. Like thefather of realism, he has used the lyrical moments
to deepen, enrich and embellish an uncompromisingly realistic and often bru­
tally ironic account of the hero’s experience. It would be wrong however to
equate the two uses of the epiphany without underlining Joyce’s contributions
to the device, contributions which derive in large part from his fundamentally
serious (as opposed to Flaubert’s comic-satiric) intention. The Portrait’s irony,
for example, is not designed to destroy Stephen, to render him insignificant,
but rather to help the reader to achieve a balanced view of a character who
is not everyman but every artist as a young man. Accordingly, Flaubert’s
anti-climactic structure and crushing irony emphasize reality to the detriment
of Frédéric’s aspirations and make reader identification unlikely; Joyce’s climactic structure and his severely limited perspective lead to reader empathy,
while his mute irony underlies the positive aspects of Stephen’s development,
gives voice to a sublimated reality. Working within what is generally described
as the combined realist and symbolist traditions, Joyce has used the epiphany
with more daring and greater subtlety. He has refurbished the device and
adapted it to his purposes, married it to other devices and new techniques;
but the essential character of the sequence has not changed and by its existence
in the Portrait the epiphany along with the anti-epiphany testifies to a commitment on Joyce’s part to a particular sort of organic structure and implicitely
to a theory of the nature of experience as a clue to identity. The tide has
“advanced from Flaubert through Jakobsen” and D’Annunzio to Joyce.